20 Favorite Actresses

The film blogosphere has another meme going around, this time started by Nathaniel R. of Film Experience, who has called for bloggers to celebrate twenty of their favorite actresses. No one’s tagged me, but that never stopped me before! So many actresses are worthy to be on a list like this, but in the end, I went with the actresses that can sell me on a film – the ones I’ll see in anything, just because they’re in it. Oh, and the level of my girl-crush on them is factored in as well. ;)

I originally wrote a paragraph about each actress (like Arbogast did in his very informative take on the meme), but opted instead for a more minimalist approach. If you want more info on the actresses or why I love them, let me know.

Maria Bello (especially: The Cooler, Thank You For Smoking, A History of Violence)

So the music video for the latest Sleater-Kinney song “A New Wave” (off their recently released album No Cities to Love, their first album in ten years) is set in Tina’s room from Bob’s Burgers. I wouldn’t consider myself a mega Sleater-Kinney fan or anything, but I do like them and have been glad to hear new music from them. Plus Jonathan and I have been enjoying getting into Bob’s Burgers recently, so this was a fun surprise to see in my feed this morning!

I usually dislike “every xyz ever” supercuts, but this one is wonderful. It’s 13 minutes long and doesn’t even outstay its welcome! I’m much more familiar with the sardonic Daffy Duck of the 1950s cartoons, but now I’m going to have to go back and watch a bunch of the earlier, crazier ones!

I usually don’t post too much about the Oscars, but these pie chart breakdowns of the Best Picture nominees are pretty funny (I’m sure I would think they were even funnier if I’d seen any of the movies!). Also, I need to post more image posts to get the really old Criterion ones out of the sidebar. :)

January Criterions have been announced! Most exciting one to me is another addition to their collection of Preston Sturges films, with The Palm Beach Story. I can’t rank this one quite as high as Sullivan’s Travels or The Lady Eve, but it’s close on their heels in terms of straight-up zany fun. I’m so glad to see Criterion release a Hollywood classic like this just about every month.

Also releasing: Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (an excellent and evocative film I’d love to own in a Criterion edition), Werner Rainer Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénega, which I’ll admit I’ve never heard of. What Criterions are going on your wishlist for January?

“There’s an old story, borne out by production records, about [producer] Arthur Hornblow Jr. deciding to exert his power by handing [Billy] Wilder and [Charles] Brackett’s fully polished draft [of the screenplay for 1939′s Midnight] to a staff writer named Ken Englund. (Like many producers, then and now, Hornblow just wanted to put some more thumbprints on it.) Englund asked Hornblow what he was supposed to do with the script, since it looked good enough to him. “Rewrite it,” said Hornblow. Englund did as he was told and returned to Hornblow’s office with a new draft whereupon the producer told him precisely what the trouble was: it didn’t sound like Brackett and Wilder anymore. “You’ve lost the flavor of the original!” Hornblow declared. Englund then pointed out that Brackett and Wilder themselves were currently in their office doing nothing, so Hornblow turned the script back to them for further work. Charlie and Billy spent a few days playing cribbage and then handed in their original manuscript, retyped and doctored with a few minor changes. Hornblow loved it, and the film went into production.”

“For the refugees, a harsh accent was the least of their troubles. The precise cases, endless portmanteaus, and complex syntactical structure of the German language made their transition to English a strain. It required a thorough rearrangement of thought. In German, the verb usually comes at the end of the sentence; in English, it appears everywhere but. In German, conversation as well as written discourse, like a well-ordered stream through a series of civilized farms, flows. In English, such constructions are stilted. We like to get to the point and get there fast. For a displaced screenwriter – an adaptable one, anyway – American English lend itself to the kind of direct, immediate, constantly unfolding expressivity that German tended to thwart. Linguistically at least, American emotions are more straightforward. The violinist Yehudi Menuhin puts it this way: ‘When you start a sentence in German, you have to know at the beginning what the end will be. In English, you live the sentence through to the end. Emotion and thought go together. In German, they’re divorced. Everything is abstract.’

For a flexible storyteller like Billie Wilder – or Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov, for that matter – the new mix of languages was wondrous, pregnant with sounds and bursting with meaning. Wilder’s ear picked up our slang as well as our pragmatic syntax, and his inventive, hard-edged mind found twentieth-century poetry in them. Puns, jokes, verbal color, even the modern-sounding American tones and resonances one could make in the mouth – all were deeply engaging to the young writer-ranconteur. It was exciting for him to get laughs in a new language.”